"In many poor countries over half the manufacturing assets are owned or controlled by foreign companies. Even in instances when the multinationals have only a minority interest, they often retain a veto control. Even when the host nation owns the enterprise in its entirety, the multinationals will enjoy benefits through their near-monopoly of technology and international marketing. Such is the case with oil, an industry in which the giant companies own only about 38 percent of the world's crude petroleum production but control almost all the refining capacity and distribution.

Given these disadvantageous trade and investment relations, Third World nations have found it expedient to borrow heavily from Western banks and from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which is controlled by the United States and other Western member-nations. By the 1990s, the Third World debt was approaching $2 trillion, and unpayable sum. The greater a nation's debt, the greater the pressure to borrow still more to meet deficits – often at still higher interest rates and on tighter payment terms.

An increasingly large portion of the earnings of indebted nations goes to servicing the debt, leaving still less for domestic consumption. The debts of some nations have grown so enormous that the interest accumulates faster than payments can be met. The debt develops a self-feeding momentum of its own, consuming more and more of the debtor nation's wealth."

• Michael Parenti, Against Empire

"the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed and demand a rent even for its natural produce.” - Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society." - Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?

There's a systemic problem in this country, and I think we need to talk about it.

We can argue about whether the system naturally creates monopolies, destroys the middle class and ultimately leads to fascism and/or collapse. We can argue about the benefits and drawbacks of socialism, the issues with Citizens United - But one thing we can't argue about is, the system is fundamentally broken, in this country.

I'm sick of reading these naive articles about inflation and the economy, and these ass-kissing journalists writing for Fortune and Business Insider - RECORD PROFITS plus RECORD INFLATION. It's not a coincidence, it's a damn dystopian novel, come to life.

"General Mills reported net sales of $19.9 billion for Fiscal 2024, down 1 percent from the previous year. Despite this slight drop, the company's operating profit held steady at $3.4 billion*, demonstrating its ability to maintain profitability even in tough times."*

These assclowns actually think 3.4 BILLION DOLLARS in profit constitutes tough economic times. "Well, but we did 3.5 billion last year, so..."... Get off of it. This obsession with growth, this... sickness of insatiability... YES. I understand, that's the model - YoY growth. But when does the growth start to be considered a goddamn cancer?

We've moved past out-of-touch billionaires who skated to success on the backs of slave wages, telling us fairy tales about pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps and taking advantage of this land of opportunity, while they crush those opportunities and put their fingers on the scales of government to protect their empires. We're no longer in the era of 'survival of the fittest', where these delusions of a free market eventually balancing the scales, keep us from offing ourselves. A handful of corporations own us. And we aren't far from a Ready Player One IOI situation at all.

We're now entering end-stage capitalism. Subscriptions are... unsurprisingly... not covered by consumer protections. So every transaction is a grift. Every new platform, a hotbed of enshittification. The Internet - arguably the only 'good' thing we've created in the last 50 years, is now an infuriating pile of badly designed garbage, designed to keep money flowing; it is dominated by ads that make our websites useless and every piece of technology that HARMS society has been engineered to work perfectly while every piece of technology that HELPS society is consistently broken - but still costs 19.99 per person, per month (prices subject to change without notice).

In this stage of capitalism, you don't get what you pay for. You either bet the farm on being shafted, or you go without. Every business, is trying to screw you - your landlord, your grocery store, your hardware store, Amazon, Google, Apple, AT&T - and there's nothing you can do about it, because it will cost you more to fight it than it does to bend over and take it.

Now what are we going to do about it?

You know, as a writer, I don’t like to talk about my emotions. Especially not here, in our way of dealing with information, there is little room for sentimentality. I have never really been troubled by the death of a revolutionary, Arab or otherwise. Sad? Yes. Disappointed? Yes. Angry? Oh yes! But I have never been troubled, shocked, by a death. After all, any good theoretician knows that a man is only one point among millions of oppressed, and that this tragedy can lead to a victory.

But the death of Hassan Nasrallah, after learning of it, made me think. After all, I remember well a young boy like me who, in 2006, kissed Nasrallah’s face on my television screen, while he was shouting victory in the face of humiliated arrogant colonizers, who tried to proclaim a land more bombed in one month than Hiroshima and Nagasaki harmed by the atomic bombs.

(Read full article at https://mac417773233.wordpress.com/2024/10/06/confessions-from-an-exiled-man/)

He was a kind of immovable figure, an unstoppable being, making the entire Satanist elites tremble, especially during his historic alliance with the Christians led by Aoun, having realized that the important thing remains the protection of the Homeland, not a religious sect, which became even more obvious with the protection of Syrians against the CIA-Led Islamists.

We criticized him for his abandon of (Islamic?) revolution, his calm and too much “reasonable” attitude regarding the Gaza war, when, in order to not drag the decadent comprador bourgeois state of Lebanon and the poor population led by it into a war for survival, he decided to always do the least in terms of military matters and ask for talks. For example in his last speech, after the pagers and commanders case... https://mac417773233.wordpress.com/2024/10/06/confessions-from-an-exiled-man/

"But to consider matters more broadly: You would be altogether mistaken in fancying that the value of labour or any other commodity whatever is ultimately fixed by supply and demand. Supply and demand regulate nothing but the temporary fluctuations of market prices. They will explain to you why the market price of a commodity rises above or sinks below its value, but they can never account for the value itself.

Suppose supply and demand to equilibrate, or, as the economists call it, to cover each other. Why, the very moment these opposite forces become equal they paralyze each other, and cease to work in the one or other direction. At the moment when supply and demand equilibrate each other, and therefore cease to act, the market price of a commodity coincides with its real value, with the standard price round which its market prices oscillate.

In inquiring into the nature of that VALUE, we have therefore nothing at all to do with the temporary effects on market prices of supply and demand." - Karl Marx, Value, Price and Profit

I also want to tell you about my idea. This is the super short version of the r/DroppedDayPlan

You basically convince as many workers as you can to permanently reduce their hours by only working 4 8 hour days instead of 5. That's 32 hours a week instead of 40. This will create a long term sustainable labor shortage that forces employers to conceed to any demands workers make from now on. That means increasing wages, improving working conditions, etc.

Democracy, but only for capital

https://x.com/DailyTrotsky/status/1833415634681528778?t=PkEv5Ss9WEybY-jAwean3g&s=19